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Behind the Scenes at Evernote HQ: An Exclusive Event Recap

Posted by SiNing Y. Chan on 16 Feb 2017

Posted by SiNing Y. Chan on 16 Feb 2017

Over 160 people braved rush hour traffic, driving as much as two and a half hours, to attend an exclusive event at Evernote. With this much buzz and excitement in the air at Evernote’s Redwood City headquarters, you’d think we were having a book signing event with a celebrity author and giveaways.

But that’s not why they came.

Evernote fans came to hear the leadership team talk about what we’re working on, and what we plan to do next. We invited Plus, Premium, and Evernote Business subscribers from the greater San Francisco Bay Area to get an insider’s view into the company, our projects, and our team.

Evernote—the app, the company, and the community

Throughout the evening, we heard some inspiring Evernote stories from our guests:

We met Rajesh, who works in ecommerce and views Evernote not only as tool for getting things done, but as a way to incubate and clarify his thoughts and ideas. “As a knowledge worker,” he explained, “if my thought processes aren’t clear, my team’s productivity would be lagging somewhere…If I am not personally organized, my team will suffer.”

We met folks who started using Evernote as students, but now, in the workforce, rely on it to gather research, to organize, and to easily retrieve design ideas. Still others use Evernote to manage teams. One owner of a Bay Area skateboard business creates a single note with checklists for each employee on his team. He uses this approach to stay on top of what each person is doing.

For one guest named Joseph, Evernote is a precious digital archive he can pass along to future generations. Before his father passed away, he saved all the family’s genealogical research he had collected to Evernote.

Evernote leaders come out to meet the community

The evening continued with Evernote’s CEO Chris O’Neill welcoming the guests and conducting a quick, ‘show-of-hands’ survey to find out who in the crowd had used Evernote the longest. The audience gave thunderous applause to those in the room who’d been faithful Evernote fans since its inception.

“I came to Evernote for a few reasons, one of which was the community.” – Chris O’Neill

“Evernote is a superpower that makes me better, more organized, and more successful in whatever it is I’m doing,” Chris began. “I was one of you,” he continued, “and came to Evernote for a few reasons, one of which was the community.”

In a brief ‘State of Evernote’ address, Chris emphasized how Evernote, as a company, “is strong and continues to be strong.” He credited this strength, in part, to the shoulders of giants, such as Stepan Pachikov, Evernote’s co-founder, who envisioned Evernote as an extension of his brain.

“Design is really just a series of conversation with the people you’re trying to serve—bringing in folks like you early in the process so we can learn.” – Nate Fortin

Erik Wrobel, Chief Product Officer, and Nate Fortin, Vice President of Design, were up next. Erik gave our guests (who all signed a non-disclosure agreements beforehand) a sneak preview of our product roadmap. Nate talked about product development, emphasizing the importance of customer feedback, stating that “design is really just a series of conversations with the people you’re trying to serve—bringing in folks like you early in the process so we can learn.”

The evening concluded with a panel of Evernote’s senior leaders who came to hear customer feedback about issues of privacy, security, and machine learning. Emily Hancock, Vice President of Legal, Rich Tener, Director of Security, and Anirban Kundu, Chief Technology Officer, were invited to join Chris upfront to field questions from the audience.

When the program officially ended, guests didn’t want to leave. A large group of people stayed behind to meet the leadership team, and to continue conversations with others they connected with at the start of the event. Still others stayed behind to share stories with us of how Evernote has positively impacted their lives. Stacy Garfinkel, a communications consultant, had this to say about the evening, “This event reminded me what I appreciate about Evernote.”

Great and makes sense, except that now my trust related to data privacy is a notch lower. What contractual clauses do you have with Google to data privacy and usage?

SiNing Chan—

Sure, data privacy is always important—and it’s in our best interest that customers, like you, are able to entrust Evernote with your data, naturally. Check out this Help Doc (https://help.evernote.com/hc/en-us/articles/226885427) for information that might provide answers to alleviate your concerns. If you’re interested in a more technical explanation about how protection of customer data, please see this post (https://blog.evernote.com/tech/2017/02/08/part-2-protecting-customer-data-gcp/)from our Tech Blog.

Andy Cortwright—

How can I hear about such events in the future? I would have loved to attend this event.

SiNing Chan—

This particular event that we hosted a couple weeks ago was specifically aimed at current subscribers of Evernote Plus, Premium, and Evernote Business (https://evernote.com/pricing/) from the greater San Francisco bay area. However, please do check the Community Event calendar (https://discussion.evernote.com/calendar) out for future events hosted by Evernote and those hosted by others in your local area. Meeting others in the Evernote Community is always inspiring, for Evernote employees and customers alike!

Andrew Wood—

Great initiative – next, do you think you could share a bit more with your premium subscribers who DON’T live in the bay area? Plans to update Mac app? Markdown? Any kind of roadmap? How about streaming some of the event for those of us outside the area next time?

SiNing Chan—

Thanks for the suggestion and feedback! Because the event went so well, we are trying to figure out how we can continue to build relationships with our customers.

Steven Santa Maria—

Sounds like a good event, especially to provide feedback to the team. I didn’t attend but would love to do so next time around!

On a side note, Dropbox just came out with their Paper app. There are some nice features there that I hope Evernote is considering.

Tony—

Did anyone talk about subnotebooks??

SiNing Chan—

I don’t recall anyone mentioning subnotebooks, but we are always working on better ways to help people better organize notes. If you’re not always familiar with them, notebook stacks are a great way to group similar notebooks together. It’s one of my favorite ways to organize! https://help.evernote.com/hc/articles/208314158

Adil—

Will we be able to write and doodle on the same document freely just like OneNote? I know we can handwrite to some extent but that is very limited especially for a student.